


The Monican Way of Death

by ide_cyan



Category: Aeon Flux (2005)
Genre: Gen, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-18
Updated: 2016-12-18
Packaged: 2018-09-09 09:38:52
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,203
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8885911
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ide_cyan/pseuds/ide_cyan





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [marcelo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/marcelo/gifts).



Babies were the problem. The Monican resistance had not suspected the full extent of the Goodchild regime's control over Breen population. With Aeon Flux's destruction of the Relical, Bregna's birthrate faced attrition. Four hundred years of carefully controlled stagnation accounted for a particular social order. No babies were unwanted. No pregnancy was unplanned. No death was final.

The regime's military recruits were encouraged to uphold a perfect society. That a network of covert resistance might take root in and grow within that society was an unspoken refutation of that thesis which they were not encouraged to examine. The perfect society had in some ways clung to superannuated notions of division of labor that saw the military life as a masculine purview. Women were not banned completely — the Goodchilds had surrounded themselves with an idealized version of an administrative body, male and female, and a likewise male and female bodyguard. But the footsoldiers who donned the body armor and hid their faces from their fellow citizens behind protective visors, so that the selfsame fellow citizens would not resent their brothers for holding them in line at gunpoint when they went about their private lives again, were men. And procreation, as it had in the prehistory of Bregna, was the excuse.

Under the perfect Goodchild regime, loving couples conceived upon consummation of their union, and consumption of certain food additives, before the implantation of cloned embryos in the expectant mother's womb.

The secret of the cloning process was the best-guarded in Bregna, literally.

While Chairman Trevor Goodchild oversaw the overall effort to repopulate, his brother, Adjunct Chairman Oren Goodchild, supervized the day-to-day and surgical operations thereof. 

Education is always a contentious matter in a police state. The citizenry must be knowledgeable enough to allow society to function, but not so original in its thoughts so as to question the tenets of its received wisdom.

Although functional literacy subsisted in the higher echelons of some specializations, literature and other forms of transmission of knowledge were strictly controlled. Citizens could visit the Breen museum offering an official history of the world, of the industrial disease and of their salvation by the Goodchild regime, but no publishing, no plays and no music could attempt to elaborate on, much less to contradict, the sanctioned dataset.

 

At the onset of the devastating epidemic that had led to the creation of Bregna, a scientist known as Monica had made a breakthrough in the neurochemical apperception of thought. Via the release of a particular cocktail of designer molecules, controlled psychosomatic effects could be achieved, and within a group of individuals tethered by linked chemical implants, knowledge could be transmitted from nervous system to nervous system, and subjective states of consciousness achieved a granularity sufficient for shared experiences. 

The Monican breakthrough contributed to the success of the Goodchild rule over their created city-state. The duumvirate used it to maintain a continuity of experience and ability, passing on their knowledge to their own cloned successors, and blurring the divide between each of their superlatively extended generations.

But the extension of this technology to the population at large was disconsidered in light of the genetic dead-end imposed by its sterility. It was deemed imprudent to allow the people to perceive the extent to which their history had become one of stagnant repetition.

Yet as Bregna was built for the purpose of sustaining the surviving human population, it required sustainable technologies to survive in itself, and biotechnologies in particular became the lynchpin of its engineering. Vertical farming, hydroponicums, organic waste reclamation, surveillance, medicine, and even prosthetics, that could augment the human body without relying on non-renewable natural resources became active sectors of inquiry, and their advancement exceeded what the Goodchilds could direct by an order of magnitude.

It was therefore throughout the less-closely monitored of these branches of activity that the forbidden fruit of Monican resistance ripened, was plucked and divided, and scattered its seeds of insurgency.

Forbidden from public assembly, discontents found they could congregate in the temples of their own bodies. 

The people of Bregna knew little of pain; it was easy to avoid, within the confines of their closely circumscribed anodyne lives. The Monicans learned to embrace it. They learned to fight, they leaned into the risks of rebellion, trespassing on dangerous grounds, and toughened themselves through repeated injuries. Through the presence of their Handler, they sublimated the pain in their chemical communion with each other.

The Monicans tasked Aeon Flux with eliminating Chairman Goodchild. She undertook the assignment as a personal mission of revenge on behalf of her sister.

If one of the pillars of the regime could be taken down, it could be permanently destabilized. 

But there were already voices of dissension within. Chairman Goodchild's brother, Adjunct Chairman Oren Goodchild, who had been at his side since the very beginning, no longer believed it necessary to cure the sterility affecting the survivors. Councilman Giroux questioned the draconians measures taken against the Monicans. And Trevor Goodchild's own position towards them came undone when Aeon Flux confronted him, and he recognized in her the clone of a woman he had thought dead beyond the possibility of rebirth.

It was via Monican means that Trevor Goodchild reached out to Aeon Flux after her failed attempt on his life. She discovered how the Goodchild regime had overseen the population of Bregna, had recycled its citizens' DNA from generation to generation, and that Trevor was still looking for a cure that would alleviate the strict control to which an otherwise unsustainable society must cleave.

Oren Goodchild's subsequent attempted coup against his brother positioned much of Bregna's armed personnel into the open even as the Monicans prepared to move against Aeon Flux (for her perceived betrayal) and Trevor Goodchild.

None of the fallen soldiers would live again by cloning.

Because of Aeon Flux, all of Bregna was suddenly thrust into the unknown. People gathered at the breach in the wall, where she stood with Chairman Goodchild. They saw that they were injured and bleeding. The crash of the Relical had torn open the safety of the city's walls that had separated humanity from the wildnessness without, and the city's leadership had been torn asunder.

They would set to work clearing trees, and wild variables would creep back in as the people took their first steps out of bounds.

Remove the clinical conditions heretofore seen in Bregna, the careful laboratory-selected population control, and pressures must reappear that seven generations have not had to contend with. 

The birthrate will fall at first, precipitously perhaps, and the population will grow older.

As fewer children are born, babies will become more desirable. As babies become more desirable, they will become a subject for contention, for the future of the world will depend on the direction of those children's lives.

Fewer children will be born, but because those children will be conceived naturally, unpredictably, there will also occur unwanted pregnancies, more desirable to others than to the women carrying them.

The Monican struggle for self-determination may need continue yet. If the Breen way of life embraces the prehistoric path to oppression as its people escape the cycle of rebirth, the path to freedom may then lie in the Monican way of death.


End file.
